To Make Live : Representing and Protesting Refugee Agency

Abstract

Dominant representations of refugees emphasize either refugees as victims or as threats. In the shifts since the outset of the refugee regime, the political agency of refugees has stopped being something to celebrate and is now read as threatening – particularly when that agency is expressed in the choice to move and to cross borders. This control of political agency represents a particular form of governmentality, which maintains a biopolitical order that is framed around the structures of citizenship. The resulting exclusion of refugees as non-citizens has created what is called here a necropolitical outside, where the power over death remains the crucial moment of decision and which can be seen most clearly in the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, in developing patterns of refugee protest and occupation throughout Europe this exclusion is being contested as refugees establish themselves as political subjects in their own right, challenging the order with new forms of conduct and ‘making themselves live’ by making themselves visible.